Rio+20: A Defining Choice

Next week, 20 years after the 1992 UN Rio Earth
Summit, representatives of the world’s governments will gather again in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil to frame a global response to the Earth’s environmental crisis.
Debates leading up to Rio+20 are focusing attention on a foundational choice
between two divergent paths to the human future.

The Money Path

For money path advocates, money is the defining measure
of value. Profit and growth in financial assets are the bottom line measures by
which they assess the performance of both the firm and the economy. They value natural wealth by the price it
will fetch in the market and look to global financial markets as the preferred mechanism
to organize our human relationships with one another and nature.

They propose that the best way to save nature is to
price
her assets and sell them to wealthy global investors to hold and manage as
their private property. Privatization, commodification, monopolization, and
financialization, they assure us, will drive up prices and thus create an
incentive to provide for their proper care to maximize a perpetual flow of
earnings.

The Life Path

For life path advocates, Earth
is our living Mother, sacred and beyond price. Her health and vitality are essential
to our well-being and are therefore a priority bottom line measure of economic performance.
In return for Earth’s gifts, we have a sacred obligation to future
generations to protect and restore to full health the wondrous generative
systems by which she replenishes her air, water, fertile soils, fish, forests,
and grasslands, and maintains the stable climate on which our health and
well-being depend.

Because we receive Earth’s abundance as a gift, we must
assure it is shared to meet the needs of all. None among us created this abundance and no one of us has a
right to claim it for our exclusive personal benefit.

Money, which is basically a system of accounting,
is only a tool useful in facilitating human exchanges beneficial to people and
nature. To use financial results as the bottom line indicator of economic
performance makes no sense and leads to disastrous results.

Illusions of the Money World

Ignoring the reality
that money in itself is nothing but a number, the institutions of money have
created a fantasy world economy grounded in a grand
illusion that money is real wealth and that making money creates real wealth
to the benefit of all.

Since
financial logic favors current returns over future returns and values natural
systems only for the financial return they generate, it can lead to dangerously
myopic short-term thinking. Here are three examples:

Money in the bank is
more valuable than trees in the ground. Some years ago the minister who
managed Malaysia’s forests explained to me why Malaysia should clear cut its
forests and sell the timber. The interest from the sale would grow faster in
the bank than the trees grow in the forest. I imagined a lifeless Malaysian
landscape populated only by banks housing computers faithfully calculating the
interest payments on Malaysia’s savings deposits.

Your fishery collapsed? No problem. A 1997
article in the culinary section of The
New York Times urged readers not to worry about the collapse of Atlantic
fisheries, because abundant supplies of delicious fish were being flown in each
day from Chile and Thailand and were even cheaper than local varieties because
of cheap labor. No mention of a global decline in fish stocks as the number of hungry
mouths in the world continues to grow.

Since it evaluates all
decisions based on financial returns to people who already have money, financial
logic assures that whatever remains of Earth’s natural wealth will be
controlled by the 1 percent, who are looking for the right moment to make a quick
profit from a speculative sale.

Serious change in the
relationship between humans and nature begins with the commitment to a new
bottom line—one that recognizes that humans are living beings, and that converting
Earth’s living capital into financial assets for the 1 percent is a suicidal act of collective delusion.

Serious change in the
relationship between humans and nature begins with the commitment to a new
bottom line that recognizes we humans are living beings.

Asking how to allocate natural resources to maximize financial return is the wrong line of questioning. In the real
world of Earth Community the question we should be asking is, “How do we best meet our human
needs in a way that maintains or enhances the health and vitality of the
natural systems on which we depend?” We would do well to answer that question by further asking,
“What would nature do?” Or, more specifically, “What does the biosphere do?”

Life and Earth Community

The biosphere, Earth’s extraordinary, interconnected
layer of life, is an exquisitely complex planetary-scale fractal structure comprised
of countless trillions of individual organisms—each of which depends on and
contributes to the life of the whole. It provides a natural systems model for a
New Economy with the capacity to meet the needs of Earth’s 7 billion humans, bring
our species into balance with Earth’s living systems, and create truly
democratic societies.

Earth’s biosphere, the
product of 3.5 billion years of trial-and-error learning, is global
in scale yet truly local everywhere, and organizes from the bottom up. With its continuous repurposing and recycling, nothing is
wasted. As a system, it has an extraordinary capacity to adapt
to local conditions and optimize
the sustainable capture, exchange, storage, and recycling of energy,
water, and nutrients. This is the key to its impressive resilience and productivity. It meets the needs of all the world’s living organisms, without any equivalent of money, global corporations, central authority, or the
destabilizing use of fossil fuels.

Because each local subsystem balances its
consumption and reproduction with local resource availability, the global
system maintains a healthy, dynamic balance with Earth’s total water, energy,
and nutrient resources.

Providing
for our human needs while bringing ourselves into balance with Earth, our living home, depends on creating a New Economy that works in symbiotic
partnership with the biosphere’s structure and dynamics to optimize the health
and well-being of all. This economy would consist of a planetary system of
resilient, locally rooted, self-reliant bio-regional economies. They would be comprised of
human-scale, locally owned enterprises that work in symbiotic partnership with
their individual local ecosystems, meeting local needs with local resources. As
each local economy comes into balance with its own place on Earth, the global
economy will in turn come into balance with Earth itself.

This
system would place decisions regarding Earth’s care in the hands of people who depend on
the generative capacity of their local, natural systems for their livelihoods—now, and for generations to come. This creates a direct and natural incentive to assure the continuing good health and productivity of
these systems. Either people maintain the productivity of their local fisheries,
or face the prospect of doing without.

Local
people will likely choose to assess the performance of their local economies using living indicators like the health and vitality of their families, communities, and natural systems—outcomes they actually want. One model might be the Gross
National Happiness indicators developed and used by the nation of Bhutan as
the basis for its economic policy making.

To navigate a transition to a New Economy we will need to create the frameworks and tools of a new economics that begins
not with the study of money, markets, and pricing, but rather with the study and deep understanding of the living systems structure and the dynamics of Earth’s biosphere. This was to be the task of ecological
economics before it became distracted by a futile effort to gain
respectability among mainstream economists. The appropriate goal of those
devoted to creating this new, ecologically grounded economics should be to gain the
attention of real world policymakers and politically active citizens.

The work of revising our legal frameworks is also
underway, backed by a global social movement seeking to secure, in law, the inalienable
rights of nature. More than 100 communities in theUnited States have passed ordinances granting rights to nature, and Ecuador has included language that recognizes the rights of nature in its constitution. Presumptuous though it may be for us to grant rights
to our sacred Earth Mother, it is a necessary step in redefining our human relationship
with her.

The real conflict is not between humans and nature.
It is between current and future human generations.

Those who live by the logic of finance will surely oppose
efforts to grant rights to nature on the grounds that it conflicts with the
natural rights and interests of the human individual. In reality, the presumed conflict
is only another example of the distortions created by myopic illusions of the money world. In the real world, the rights and interests of nature align remarkably
well with the rights and interests of future human generations.

The real conflict is not between humans and nature.
It is between current and future human generations. When the actions of current
generations reduce or destroy the generative capacity of Earth’s natural living
systems for a quick financial return or gratuitous shot of material
gratification, we do not borrow from future generations: We steal from them.
Because of the profound implications for their well-being, this may be the
ultimate crime against humanity. We are just beginning to realize it may as
well be a crime against creation.

Given current
environmental politics and the record of previous UN environmental summits,
there is little prospect that Rio+20 will produce an international agreement of
substance to guide us to a just and sustainable human future. We can, however,
consider it a victory for people and nature if proposals by Wall Street
interests seeking to advance the commodification and financialization of nature
are clearly and publically rejected; and if the call for a new framework based on
recognition of the rights of nature and acceptance of our moral obligation to our
scared Earth Mother gains further traction.

Interested?

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